Thursday, March 03, 2005

Tactics Abroad

I would love to train at the Jerusalem police academy. That would be a huge honor and I would imagine an eye-opening experience. Check out this story from the Jerusalem Post:

Jerusalem police called off a state of red alert that had been in place for six hours in the city Wednesday afternoon, police said. Police went on heightened alert shortly after noon on Wednesday after receiving intelligence warnings of a planned terror attack in the city.

Throughout the afternoon, police carried out spotchecks on vehicles and increased their presencethroughout the city in a last ditch attempt to ward off or catch any potential bomber. The police had also increased their presence andactivities at security checkpoints surrounding Jerusalem. The high state of alert in the city came just fivedays after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at a Tel Aviv nightclub killing five Israelis.

The story itself isn't that fascinating, but it really makes you think about an entirely different police culture. Over here, we are cognizant of officer safety issues such as how to approach a stopped car so as to minimize our likelihood of being shot. Over there, there is a radically different set of issues. The guy you approach might have a huge bomb strapped to his chest. He may blow it just because you turned on your lights. There's almost no way to know when another terrorist might explode on you. The tactics that they teach over there must be intense.

I went to the Israeli Police website to see what they had. It turns out that their full-time training program is about as long as a full time academy is over here, actually a little less. However, every citizen of Israel has to join the military for a period of time, so I suppose they are not working from scratch like over here. Even so, I'm curious what we do that is the same and what we do that is different.

Searching around on this topic led me to this little story. It was published shortly after 9/11 and it's about how the US could benefit from Israel's law enforcement practices. I enjoyed this excerpt:

For instance, evidence obtained without a search warrant is easier to introduce in courts in Israel than in America. It is simpler for Israeli law enforcement agencies to obtain wiretaps. Arab terrorism suspects are held in "administrative detention" for years without charges or trials. And Israel's "profile" method of interviewing airline passengers, screening pedestrians and detaining drivers, in which Arabs and others deemed to be high-risk are targeted for special attention, might go down poorly in a country as diverse as the United States.

Not too shabby, Israel. I guess when you are under constant attack from bloodthirsty terrorists, you're not to worried about profiling. They take security seriously over there. And I bet you they don't have a Cultural Diversity class during their training... lucky...